In Long Island City, bigger buildings, smaller apartments

From left: The View and The Madison, two luxury developments in Long Island City

The towers are getting taller but the apartments are growing smaller in Long Island City and surrounding areas.

Although the trend towards building smaller apartments is not uncommon in New York, in Queens it has happened at three times the speed. Since 2007, the Wall Street Journal reports, 7,636 apartments have been completed in the area and more than 12,800 are planned or under construction.

According to a new market report from Modern Spaces, the average square footage of a Long Island City condo on the market fell each quarter since the beginning of 2012. In the second quarter of 2014, the average condo size in Queens was 29 percent smaller — with an average of 828 square feet — than two years earlier. [WSJ] — Claire Moses